Acts 9:1-9
All this time Saul was breathing down the necks of the Master’s disciples, out for the kill. He went to the Chief Priest and got arrest warrants to take to the meeting places in Damascus so that if he found anyone there belonging to the Way, whether men or women, he could arrest them and bring them to Jerusalem.
He set off. When he got to the outskirts of Damascus, he was suddenly dazed by a blinding flash of light. As he fell to the ground, he heard a voice: “Saul, Saul, why are you out to get me?”
He said, “Who are you, Master?”
“I am Jesus, the One you’re hunting down. I want you to get up and enter the city. In the city you’ll be told what to do next.”
His companions stood there dumbstruck—they could hear the sound, but couldn’t see anyone—while Saul, picking himself up off the ground, found himself stone-blind. They had to take him by the hand and lead him into Damascus. He continued blind for three days. He ate nothing, drank nothing.
Killing some time one evening this past week before the opening of a musical performance I was attending, I wandered into Copperfield Books in Sebastopol and – as was to be expected – wandered out again a bit later with a new book in hand. The author is Neil Gaiman, who is one of my absolute favorites. Gaiman generally writes fiction but this is a collection of essays – my favorite literary form – making this a double winner for me.
The next morning I picked up the book and started with the Introduction – got two whole sentences into my reading and discovered a statement that sent me off to work on this message about Paul, instead. In explaining why he made an early career move from journalism to fiction-writing, Gaiman wrote: I wanted to be able to tell the truth without ever needing to worry about the facts.
This simple sentence perfectly encapsulates what I am trying to say in this sermon series, which is that what we read in scripture can be truth without being strictly speaking, factual. Would the various writers of the books of the New Testament have worried about this distinction? Most likely not. Theirs was still a tribal/hero-mythology based culture which didn’t share our post-enlightenment culture’s obsession with “facts” – just truth.
So -- what does all this have to do with Paul, who is after all, the topic of this message? We talked last week about the distinction between memory and testimony. This week we’re going to add in a third term which we’ll run into this summer. That term is development, which is what happens to memory and testimony with the passage of time. As Christian communities formed and grew, as the stories were told over and over again, often with minor variations and local twists, as the original sources aged and died, as the communities argued about what was true and what was not – a canonical narrative eventually evolved and faith began developing into dogma. Paul, we will find, was one of the major architects of this orthodox dogma.
We have two major sources of information about Paul himself in the NT. The first seven letters Paul wrote – the one’s we’re focusing on this summer are not only the earliest of the NT documents to be written – the ones chronologically closest to the actual life of Jesus – they are generally agreed to have been written by Paul himself.
The second source is the Book of Acts written by someone who called his/her self Luke. Roughly two-thirds of Acts is about the life of Saul/Paul, from his conversion, through his several missionary journeys, to his death.
We are looking into seven of Paul’s letters, but there are thirteen letters purporting to be from Paul found in the New Testament. The first seven are generally considered to be genuinely Pauline. The remaining six are not.
The early, genuine letters date from the 50’s, only twenty years or so beyond Jesus’ life. When Paul writes about himself, he is surely a trustworthy source – or at least as trustworthy as any of us are, recognizing that most of us, when we talk about ourselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, do a little editing to make ourselves sound better than, perhaps, we really are. When Paul speaks about Jesus, however, he is telling us a mixture of what he believed he was given in a personal encounter with Jesus and what he himself has been told – memories of first-hand witnesses mixed with their testimony of what those memories have come to mean to them.
Acts, however, wasn’t written until between 90 to 110 CE. The stories told in Acts about Paul’s travels may indeed contain a lot of “facts”, but they surely have been considerably developed in that length of time by repetition and orthodox interpretation.
We all know the story as it has come down to us, the story of Saul the anti-Christian zealot who was out to exterminate this pernicious sect that was threatening Judaism. Saul, who met up with a blinding light and a voice no one else heard as he was traveling to Damascus to hunt down and eradicate more Christians. Saul, who became Paul – evangelist, church-builder. Paul, who shaped our thinking about what it is to be a Jesus-follower.
Down to today Paul is loved by many and not-so-loved by many others. Many self-styled Christians today are actually Paul-followers, rather than Jesus-followers -- preferring Paul's orthodoxy and dogma to Jesus’ “love them anyway” message. Some celebrate Paul’s “organization” of Jesus’ somewhat loose message of life in the kingdom into a tidy set of “Rules for being a Christian,” while others dislike its rigidity and prefer Jesus' simple blanket instruction for us to love one another.
In fairness to Paul we have to point out that while he has been disliked for many things, most of the statements attributed to him that we really hate, like “women should sit down and shut-up in church,” or “slaves should accept their lot and be good little slaves,” or “same-sex relationships are evil (even though Jesus never said any such thing)” -- these statements are probably not from Paul at all. Each of these comes from one of the disputed letters – the six letters that most scholars today think were written by others with Paul’s name attached for credibility.
The Paul that we find in the first seven letters – the ones we are planning to read this summer – is not the hard-nosed, intolerant Paul we often find in the later six, dubiously authored letters. He is sometimes conflicted, but always comes down on the Jesus-side. The Paul we’re going to meet in these readings this summer is much more often a man who was literally knocked off his feet by a personal encounter with Jesus – the brother who loves us. We will be meeting a man who encountered truth and was knocked clear out of his old, judgmental, intolerant self and into life in the kingdom of God – here and now.
If our intent is to find the “facts” of Paul’s life and beliefs we may or may not find them in these writings. Simply because Paul’s name is used and a story is told about him it does not guarantee that it is factual. If we are looking for the “truth” of one man’s encounter with the essence of truth, it is here for the finding.
The story of the Road to Damascus is told three times in Acts – and nowhere else -- and probably happened as close as five years after the death of Jesus. It is possible that Paul, as a very young man, may have actually seen Jesus. He certainly knew people who had seen him.
The story is told in Acts with greater or lesser detail, including being thrown from his horse and blinded. While this event may well have happened relatively early, it was written down well after the fact. In his letters, I believe, Paul only refers to it as his “encounter” with Jesus. Does it make a difference if we are talking about a physical event or an emotional-spiritual one? Not that I can see. The truth is that Paul met Jesus and it changed his life.
Another point of interest – most bible interpreters refer to this event as Paul’s “conversion.” Conversion generally means changing from one religion to another. There is, instead, no sign in any of the writings that Paul considered this a conversion. In his heart he never left Judaism. Judaism and Christianity had not split at this time, so it wasn’t a decision to leave Judaism – it was simply another way to be a good Jew, following God’s most recent revelation.
Paul became famous - or notorious, depending on your point of view – because of his fervent belief that this new revelation to the Jews was really a revelation to the world – Jews and Gentiles alike. His name shift from the Hebrew Saul to the more Greco-Roman Paul was probably done to facilitate his move into the Gentile world. This move brought new converts and expanded and built the church in the wider world. It also brought Paul enemies galore from the numbers of the rigidly orthodox of the Jewish faith.
We will begin our travels with Paul next Sunday with Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. As we go along, we will try to look for the truth, without getting hung up debating facts.
The next morning I picked up the book and started with the Introduction – got two whole sentences into my reading and discovered a statement that sent me off to work on this message about Paul, instead. In explaining why he made an early career move from journalism to fiction-writing, Gaiman wrote: I wanted to be able to tell the truth without ever needing to worry about the facts.
This simple sentence perfectly encapsulates what I am trying to say in this sermon series, which is that what we read in scripture can be truth without being strictly speaking, factual. Would the various writers of the books of the New Testament have worried about this distinction? Most likely not. Theirs was still a tribal/hero-mythology based culture which didn’t share our post-enlightenment culture’s obsession with “facts” – just truth.
So -- what does all this have to do with Paul, who is after all, the topic of this message? We talked last week about the distinction between memory and testimony. This week we’re going to add in a third term which we’ll run into this summer. That term is development, which is what happens to memory and testimony with the passage of time. As Christian communities formed and grew, as the stories were told over and over again, often with minor variations and local twists, as the original sources aged and died, as the communities argued about what was true and what was not – a canonical narrative eventually evolved and faith began developing into dogma. Paul, we will find, was one of the major architects of this orthodox dogma.
We have two major sources of information about Paul himself in the NT. The first seven letters Paul wrote – the one’s we’re focusing on this summer are not only the earliest of the NT documents to be written – the ones chronologically closest to the actual life of Jesus – they are generally agreed to have been written by Paul himself.
The second source is the Book of Acts written by someone who called his/her self Luke. Roughly two-thirds of Acts is about the life of Saul/Paul, from his conversion, through his several missionary journeys, to his death.
We are looking into seven of Paul’s letters, but there are thirteen letters purporting to be from Paul found in the New Testament. The first seven are generally considered to be genuinely Pauline. The remaining six are not.
The early, genuine letters date from the 50’s, only twenty years or so beyond Jesus’ life. When Paul writes about himself, he is surely a trustworthy source – or at least as trustworthy as any of us are, recognizing that most of us, when we talk about ourselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, do a little editing to make ourselves sound better than, perhaps, we really are. When Paul speaks about Jesus, however, he is telling us a mixture of what he believed he was given in a personal encounter with Jesus and what he himself has been told – memories of first-hand witnesses mixed with their testimony of what those memories have come to mean to them.
Acts, however, wasn’t written until between 90 to 110 CE. The stories told in Acts about Paul’s travels may indeed contain a lot of “facts”, but they surely have been considerably developed in that length of time by repetition and orthodox interpretation.
We all know the story as it has come down to us, the story of Saul the anti-Christian zealot who was out to exterminate this pernicious sect that was threatening Judaism. Saul, who met up with a blinding light and a voice no one else heard as he was traveling to Damascus to hunt down and eradicate more Christians. Saul, who became Paul – evangelist, church-builder. Paul, who shaped our thinking about what it is to be a Jesus-follower.
Down to today Paul is loved by many and not-so-loved by many others. Many self-styled Christians today are actually Paul-followers, rather than Jesus-followers -- preferring Paul's orthodoxy and dogma to Jesus’ “love them anyway” message. Some celebrate Paul’s “organization” of Jesus’ somewhat loose message of life in the kingdom into a tidy set of “Rules for being a Christian,” while others dislike its rigidity and prefer Jesus' simple blanket instruction for us to love one another.
In fairness to Paul we have to point out that while he has been disliked for many things, most of the statements attributed to him that we really hate, like “women should sit down and shut-up in church,” or “slaves should accept their lot and be good little slaves,” or “same-sex relationships are evil (even though Jesus never said any such thing)” -- these statements are probably not from Paul at all. Each of these comes from one of the disputed letters – the six letters that most scholars today think were written by others with Paul’s name attached for credibility.
The Paul that we find in the first seven letters – the ones we are planning to read this summer – is not the hard-nosed, intolerant Paul we often find in the later six, dubiously authored letters. He is sometimes conflicted, but always comes down on the Jesus-side. The Paul we’re going to meet in these readings this summer is much more often a man who was literally knocked off his feet by a personal encounter with Jesus – the brother who loves us. We will be meeting a man who encountered truth and was knocked clear out of his old, judgmental, intolerant self and into life in the kingdom of God – here and now.
If our intent is to find the “facts” of Paul’s life and beliefs we may or may not find them in these writings. Simply because Paul’s name is used and a story is told about him it does not guarantee that it is factual. If we are looking for the “truth” of one man’s encounter with the essence of truth, it is here for the finding.
The story of the Road to Damascus is told three times in Acts – and nowhere else -- and probably happened as close as five years after the death of Jesus. It is possible that Paul, as a very young man, may have actually seen Jesus. He certainly knew people who had seen him.
The story is told in Acts with greater or lesser detail, including being thrown from his horse and blinded. While this event may well have happened relatively early, it was written down well after the fact. In his letters, I believe, Paul only refers to it as his “encounter” with Jesus. Does it make a difference if we are talking about a physical event or an emotional-spiritual one? Not that I can see. The truth is that Paul met Jesus and it changed his life.
Another point of interest – most bible interpreters refer to this event as Paul’s “conversion.” Conversion generally means changing from one religion to another. There is, instead, no sign in any of the writings that Paul considered this a conversion. In his heart he never left Judaism. Judaism and Christianity had not split at this time, so it wasn’t a decision to leave Judaism – it was simply another way to be a good Jew, following God’s most recent revelation.
Paul became famous - or notorious, depending on your point of view – because of his fervent belief that this new revelation to the Jews was really a revelation to the world – Jews and Gentiles alike. His name shift from the Hebrew Saul to the more Greco-Roman Paul was probably done to facilitate his move into the Gentile world. This move brought new converts and expanded and built the church in the wider world. It also brought Paul enemies galore from the numbers of the rigidly orthodox of the Jewish faith.
We will begin our travels with Paul next Sunday with Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. As we go along, we will try to look for the truth, without getting hung up debating facts.
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